There are several publicly available environmental data sources that you can use to build apps, hosted on Microsoft Azure. You can use a £125/$200 Azure free trial that gives you access to just about all services that you may need. Sign up at http...

There is a lot of excitement around NoSQL approaches for research applications across many different domains. The advantages of simplicity, scalability, and flexibility are extremely tempting, but it's not always easy to figure out how to deploy such...

Faster processors, more memory and SSD hard drives... The new D-Series virtual machines on Azure are ideal for many compute and data-intensive research applications. They offer up to 112GB RAM, 800 GB SSD temporary hard drives, and 60% more speed. Find...

On April 15 we closed submission for the Microsoft Azure for Research Award program. After a careful review we are very pleased to announce 47 new awardees. These project cover a huge range of topics in wide variety of research domains. We continue to...

Dennis Gannon & Kristin Tolle, Microsoft Research On April 29 th and 30 th , 2014 Microsoft Research hosted the eScience in the Cloud workshop. We had two days of great talks and discussion covering the critical themes that surround doing eScience...

In pulling together some of the resources we have for the Azure for Research program – I decided to utilize Cuarh! - Curate the web and share what you know site to aggregate some of the links and related sites to the overall effort. If you have...

Today we’ve made online versions of the Windows for Azure training for researchers available to complement the availability of all the course materials . Also if you have the ability to attend the training in person – there are many sessions coming...

Every other month we have a deadline for proposal for our Azure for Research Program. And on the 15 of the month we have a small committee that reviews the proposals and we receive a lot of them. We were very excited by the quality of this batch of proposals...

Coming in March – there is going to be a special Azure for Research Request for Proposals – focusing on Science VMs for Research. Take a look at the opportunity and get your request in by March 15th. Building cloud virtual machines for research...

Just saw the announcement of the e-book “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows Azure” – a good resource for anyone interested in developing for the cloud. Announcing E-book version of Scott Guthrie’s “Building Real-World Cloud Apps with Windows...

Great news for folks looking for guidance on developing apps for the Azure Cloud – take a look at the Cloud Design Patters – it includes the following Twenty four design patterns that are useful in cloud-hosted applications. Each pattern is provided in...

Life sciences has been one of the most productive areas of research using cloud computing. There are many reasons for this. First and foremost is the fact that the genomics revolution is now driven by large data and many important discoveries are being...

Over the last three years we have been helping researchers use the Windows Azure cloud platform to host scientific research projects. And we just launched the new Azure4Research program and we have new collection of projects are coming on-board. What...

The initial Windows Azure For Research awards have been awarded – check out the complete list – the next submission deadline is in Dec. Windows Azure for Research Award winners Microsoft Research is pleased to announce the successful applicants...

This past week Microsoft Research launched a new program Azure For Research – to help facilitate and accelerate scientific research by enabling researchers to utilize Windows Azure to help with their scientific challenges. Our team of researchers...